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Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) | |
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American novelist, poet, critic, teacher, who became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986. Warren's best-known novel is ALL THE KING'S MEN (1946), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. His poetic style was, at the beginning, tightly controlled in form, but later Warren wrote often in free verse. Warren was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice, in 1957 for PROMISES, and 1979 for NOW AND THEN. "We live in time so little time Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. His mother was a school teacher and father, Robert Franklin, a banker, a poetry-loving but aloof figure, whose character appeared in several of Warren's poems. Before dinner, or after, he used to read poems or history to his children. A free thinker, he also encouraged Warren to read Darwin at the age of fourteen. During his boyhood and adolescence, Warren spent summers around Cerulean Springs on the farm of his grandfather, a Confederate veteran, "the living symbol of the wild action and romance of the past." ('A Self-Interview', New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 11 October 1953). Warren's childhood house was full of books. In an article (The New York Times, May 12, 1985) Warren tells that once he found his father's name and picture from an old book entitled Poets of America. "I showed him the book. He took it-what must have been an old vanity publication of some kind-and turned away. I never saw it again. But years later the episode became haunting for me, even in poems, including one long poem about the man, then long dead. By then I had found his old Greek lexicon and his grammar, dating back to his youth when he, having his first job, had hired a professor at the university in Clarksville, Tenn., to tutor him. That, too, got into poetry." At the age of 17 Warren lost his change for naval career at Annapolis, when his younger brother, William Thomas, throw over a hedge a piece coal. It hit him in the left eye, which he lost to surgery. In 1921 he entered Vanderbilt University to study electrical engineering, but soon joined the literary group Fugitives (later the Agrarians), named after the poetry magazine they published in the mid-1920s. Among its members were John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. In 1930 Warren contributed their manifesto I'LL TAKE MY STAND, a plea for the agrarian way of life in the South. Warren attacked on northern industrialism of America-he saw that black workers from the land were exploited in factories. In 1924 Warren attempted suicide. He had fallen far behind his studies and he had an unsuccessful love affair. Warren's first book, JOHN BROWN, about the abolitionist's life and politics, appeared when he was 24. Following graduation in 1925, Warren pursued studies at Berkeley, Yale, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, earning his B.Litt in 1930. During this period Warren met such writers as Hart Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Katherine Anne Porter was his fellow protester during the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial. As a professor of literature, Warren edited the literary quarterly The Southern Review, one of the most noteworthy magazines of its time, which he had founded with Cleanth Brook and Charles W. Pipkin. It published stories and poems by Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Ford Madox Ford, and W.H. Auden, among others. The magazine was disbanded in 1942. From 1930 Warren held a succession of academic positions. He worked as a teacher at Yale, Vanderbilt University, Southwestern College, Memphis, Louisiana State University. He was professor at the University of Minnesota (1942-1950) and Yale from 1950, and professor emeritus from 1973. Although Warren did not live during the last decades of his life in the South, its history and culture remained central in his works. "The place I wanted to live, the place I thought was heaven to me after my years of wandering," he later said in an interview, "was middle Tennessee." WHO SPEAKS FOR THE NEGRO? (1965) was based on his interview about the civil rights movement. He had defended segregation in his early essay, 'The Briar Patch,' but later Warren said that he had been wrong. Other works of non-fictional prose include SEGREGATION: THE INNER CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH (1956) and REMEMBER THE ALAMO! (1958). In 1939 Warren published his first novel, NIGHT RIDER, a story about tobacco war (1905-1908) between the independent growers in Kentucky and large tobacco companies. All the King's Men, narrated by a reporter, Jack Burden, was based on the Louisiana politician and demagogue Huey "the Kingfish" Long, whose career Warren had observed from a distance at Louisiana State University. Warren wrote the work first as a verse play, called Proud Flesh. Warren's examination of Machiavellian politics and idealism corrupted by power was a critical and popular success. It gained fame also as a play and film, and was translated into twenty languages. PROMISES (1957) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1958. Warren's other novels include AT HEAVEN'S GATE (1943), WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME (1950), a historical novel about a murder trial in Kentucky in the 1820s, FLOOD: A ROMANCE OF OUR TIMES (1964), the story of a Tennessee Valley Authority dam project, and A PLACE TO COME TO (1977). Warren published ten novels but he regarded himself as a poet first and a novelist and critic second. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), "the apotheosis of modernity", as John Crowe Ransom characterized it, influenced Warren deeply. In 1972 he recalled in an interview, that "it was certainly a watershed in my life and the lives of many of my friends". Warren also argued in 1939 that American poetry had very little to offer the modern writer. Whitman's influence, on the technical side, he considered "destructive". Warren's early career as a poet attracted little public attention, and for many years his fame as a writer rested chiefly upon his philosophical novels. He wrote literary criticism about such writers as Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Coleridge and Melville. His first book of verse, THIRTY-SIX POEMS (1935) showed the influence of Ransom, Thomas Hardy, and the 17th-century metaphysical poets, whom he specialized in teaching. Warren's experimental tendency, partly inspired by T.S. Eliot's works, marked the collection ELEVEN POEMS ON THE SAME THEME (1942), and culminated in one of his very finest poems, 'The Ballad of Billie Potts,' in SELECTED POEMS, 1923-1943 (1944). The volumes of poetry after BROTHER TO DRAGONS (1953), which centered upon a killing of a slave committed by Thomas Jefferson's nephew, feature a number of forms and styles, and range through various subject matter. Warren has told that there has been periods when he just stared "the empty space on a sheet of paper which the right word would not come to fill." Between 1956 and 1962 Warren took a break from teaching at Yale. TO A LITTLE GIRL, ONE YEAR OLD, IN A RUINED FORTRESS (1956) appeared after his divorce and a new marriage. It was inspired by Mediterranean scenes, and started a new period in the authors creative life. RUMOR VERIFIED (1981) received mixed critics and was condemned by Donald Hall for abstraction, melodrama, and carelessness. "In one short poem we have love, heart, pastness, hope, despair, doom, future, history, ignorance and experience. The capitalized abstraction Time turns up 14 times, along with Reality, Hope, Eternity, History, Space and Truth. Cliché and abstraction compete with banality: 'Have you ever seen your own child, that first morning, wait/ For the school bus?'" (The New York Times, November 8, 1981) As one of the leading representatives of the New Criticism, he collaborated with Cleanth Brooks to write UNDERSTANDING POETRY (1938) and UNDERSTANDING FICTION (1943). These works helped revolutionize the teaching of literature by bringing New Criticism into the general practice in America's college classrooms. This approach emphasized the detailed textual analysis of poetry instead of examining the mind and personality of the author. Warren's marriage to Emma Cinina Brescia (1930), whose neurasthenic personality forced her to spend most of her time bedridden, ended in divorce in 1950. From 1944 to 1953, Warren published no poetry. In 1952 he married the novelist Eleanor Clark; they had a son and a daughter. From the 1950s Warren lived in Connecticut and in rural Vermont, a recurring site for his poetry, such as 'Vermont Ballad: Change of Season' (1980). His last years Warren suffered from cancer. He died on September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. Warren received many honors, including National Medal for Literature in 1970, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and the Prize Fellowship of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1981. He was named Poet Laureate in 1986 and held the post for two years. For further reading: The Fugitives: A Critical Account by J.A. Bradbury (1958); Warren: The Dark and Bloody Ground by L. Caspar (1960); Robert Penn Warren by C.H. Bohner (1964); Robert Penn Warren by P. West (1964); Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by J.L. Longley (1965): Colder Fire: The Poetry of Warren by V.A. Strandberg (1965); The Novels of Warren by B. Guttenberg (1975); The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren by V. Strandberg (1977); In the Heart's Last Kingdom by C. Bedient (1984); The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren by William Bedford Clark (1991); Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction by J.R. Millichap (1992); Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality by R.S. Koppelman (1995); Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner (1997); Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by J.L. Blotner (1997); The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren, ed. by David Madden (2000); Robert Penn Warren, ed. by Harold Bloom (2000); Poems of Pure Imagination: Robert Penn Warren and the Romantic Tradition by Lesa Carnes Corrigan (2001); Understanding Robert Penn Warren by James A. Grimshaw Jr. (2001); Conversations With Robert Penn Warren, ed. by Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (2005) Selected works:
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